Extreme Scale Computational Atmospheric Science - Insights for the Petascale Vantage Point
Dr. William T.C. Kramer
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Urbana - Champaign, Illinois
Abstract
NCSA recently deployed one of the world’s more capable and general computational, data and analysis system with the sustained petascale Blue Waters System. Blue Waters consists of multiple petascale sub-systems including the world’s largest, most diverse computer Cray has ever built, the world’s most performant on-line storage system, the largest and fastest HPSS near-line storage system ever created, the world’s largest 40 Gbps local network and 100+ Gbps wide-area networks. A system of Blue Waters power and diversity provides unprecedented challenges and opportunities, all of which are only a precursor to deploying and using future extreme scale systems.
This talk presents insights, lessons, successes and continuing challenges that apply to today’s Petascale and the next decade’s Extreme scale systems and science applications with particular focus to the issues and opportunities relevant to Atmospheric Sciences applications. The talk concludes with some honest observations about co-design, current and proposed plans to reach extreme scale and whether the world ends if we do or do not reach an Exaflop in the next seven years.